Those Swingin’ Seventies
In an earlier post, WT and I were talking about crappy skyscrapers, and mutually decided that some of them were cool. (RIP World Trade Center…)
This one, shown from CHNN Headquarters, and then from the street, is Charles Luckman’s building, formerly the First National Bank Tower, which although derided at the time and since by Ada Louise Huxtable and many other lesser critics, I’ve always loved, back since I was a tiny tot and called it the bell-bottom building. It was the tallest by far in Little Beirut, which hadn’t even been named that yet in 1971, and that alone captured my seven-year-old imagination, and it still packs a punch almost 40 years later.
Update: I took a wander back to take some more pictures. the evening being so darn lovely.
I don’t know why it is, but today I seem to be in the grip of an entirely reprehensible nostalgia. There was once a tearoom atop Bullocks Wilshire, one of the finest buildings on the West Coast. (The porte cochere alone, dearest hag, would bring tears to your eyes, if only for the sheer, unbridled optimism of its ceiling frescos.)
Things which aren’t (really) there anymore….
Anyway, this tearoom, which I visited for the first time about five years before Bullocks ceased being Bullocks and became a law school, was as elegant in 1989 as it had been in 1929, and some of the waiters looked as though they’d been there the whole time. I can still see the place — tablecloths and bud vases, a potted plant on the maitre d’s station. — CHNN should have such a watering hole for the matrons who haven’t yet ascended to the status of hag.
That stretch of the Miracle Mile has always enchanted me; the Wiltern theatre, the May Company, (now part of LACMA) so many cool Art Deco bulidings, flashy enough to capture the attention of the speeding motorist, which although they killed downtown, eventually were themselves killed by Beverly Center, Century City, et al. With each killing, the buildings got uglier. And the Hag lounges? The last one here died when Macy’s turned most of the former Meier and Frank building into a boutique hotel, placing it’s crappy white-drywalled rat warrens in a few lower floors, and leaving the rest to ,a rather untimely in its fanciness, hotel and restaurant that charges $80 for a steak, a la carte… I give it two more months.
Yeah, the May Company building was another of my old haunts, and I saw Hair in the old Wiltern just after they renovated it back God knows how long ago.
Here’s another in joke: the plot-thickening scene in the Eighties B-film Miracle Mile (Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, Denise Crosby) took place in another old hangout of mine — the outrageously, quintessentially swoopy LA coffee shop across Fairfax from the May Company. Think long, long stainless steel and sparkly formica countertop with leatherette stools, an enormous tile mosaic on the wall facing it, in tones of hot orange, cherry and purple. The phone-booth outside, which triggers all the action in the film, was, sadly, just a prop.
That place was still there until just a few years ago; I remember it distinctly…
I just went and took more pictures of the Bell Bottom, for your viewing pleasure.
More graceful than most from that period. Also, skyscrapers are kinda like Tiffany lamps. One is a conversation piece; a whole house full of them, accompanied by claw-footed, brocaded couches, marble-topped tables and drapes with tassles on them, and suddenly you feel your collar wants loosening.
I think what it succeeds as is minimalist sculpture; the detailing is simple and vertical, suitable to its scale. Where it fails is in its relationship to the street. Notice that on a sunny Saturday, the streets are empty. Today zoning requires street-level retail and encourages awnings, and a few blocks north, in the retail district, the streets are crowded and interesting.
Yes, the human scale. One wants it, even though economies of scale, land values, etc., dictate that increased density means increased height. Manhattan is obviously not the solution, but then neither is Los Angeles, f’ing everything you want being at least 10 miles away. With public transportation, the latter might be nicer, but only just.
I used to love the idea that you could — if you had the time — walk anywhere in Manhattan. I did the Battery to Columbia trek many times when I was staying there, and despite the choking fumes, I loved it. So much to feast the eyes and ears on. When I lived in LA, without a car, I used to get the same pleasure out of riding the bus, although the bus system in LA at the time absolutely sucked. If you didn’t pay careful heed, you could get stranded in the damndest places. I once spent most of an entire night on a bench at the Wilshire entrance to Beverly Hills, for example, after an ill-timed trip from Venice to the Strip in 1966. The cops checked on me every hour, from about midnight to 6:00 a.m., when the buses started running again. Ugh!
I think I told you that I’m about 30 miles or so from Arcosanti. Soleri has what’s probably the most interesting take on density, and its potential to reduce the human footprint on the environment. Whether it would work or not is anyone’s guess at this point, mainly because no one has ever been interested in funding a true test of his ideas, but frankly, he fascinates me. I’m in the process of re-reading Etica e Invenzione Urbana, and hope to do some posts about it later in the summer, provided I can get off my current political jag.
Then again, democracy, decentralization, and a decent respect for the environment kinda go hand-in-hand, as Portland so amply demonstrates. I sometimes wonder how it feels to be living in the most advanced city in the U.S. By comparison, living in AZ is like living in Siberia — a very hot Siberia, anyway. Maybe a better way to describe it is half Siberia, half hell.
The zoning and transit changes, instituted by Mayor Goldschmidt in the 1970′s (he also liked teenagers… girls, though, but we didn’t know that at the time….) took all these years to pay off, but it does seem to have worked in many ways. One freeway was cancelled in favor of light rail, and another was ripped out and made into Waterfront Park. The urban renewal of the 60′s that ripped out South Portland, near my neighborhood, and gave us the atrocious Marquam Bridge, produced a backlash that never stopped.
In the 1970′s it was quite radical to do these things, and no one had ever suggested requiring street-level retail before, but it prevented downtown from turning into a lifeless network of forbidding streets, darkened by its unfriendly fortress-like behemoths, like Seattle and LA. Unfortunately, our 200′ blocks have made whole-block developments the standard “unit” of development, contributing to the refrigerator effect.
We have had two developments come up during the recent boom; one a relative success and one a dismal failure, with some valuable lessons.
The Pearl, north of downtown, and South Waterfront are both connected to downtown via the streetcar, but the successful one, the Pearl, is just across Burnside, where South waterfront has a tangle of overhead freeway ramps and an unsightly barge factory in the 1/4 mile or so that separates it from anything civilized. Even the fancy aerial tram to OHSU and an OHSU facility didn’t help much in selling the chockablock 30-story condos that popped up out of nowhere. The bust came before it reached critical mass, and I bet it will take 20 years before that area resembles a neighborhood.
Great bus story, WT…. Why didn’t the cop just give you a ride?
WT, I luuuuve Arcosanti, and followed Pablo S even before he designed it. Inspired by Bucky Fuller, I’ve long suspected. Many’s my anecdotes filed under ‘Architecture’ for having been an ersatz A-tect by proxy and surrogacy. Where I was enrolled to study Math and Psych (something left-brain right-brain schismo going on maybe), Ill.Inst.o’Tech, was the Mies van der Rohe bastion of bauhaus brandished in American architecture. (Downstate, at Champaign-Urbana, Bucky found fertile seminary, and Frank Lloyd W. had a house or two touted somewhere in the Land of Lincoln.)
Steel-and-glass was Mies’s manifest industry. Further dating myself, in the day I watched (and toured) the Hancock Building going up — exoskeleton extreme, and later the McCormick Place — cantilever extreme, among a dozen lesser celebrateds though no less pure examples of the ‘box.’ I was gone by the time the Sears Tower broke ground but by then it was somewhat anticlimactic, or at least mostly melodramatic.
Gone on to become a seer ….
I foresee a (not-far) future where North America’s inhabitation reverts to a vision of Lewis & Clark’s finding, with scattered settlements (area Arcosanti‘s) in sustainable steady-state symbiosis with the surrounds of each, dotting the landscape like tribal First People’s villages … except everyone wielding a node in a planetwide point-to-point video network, (Dick Tracy’s 2-way wrist TV). All political polemics flattened to two layers: local notions and United ‘Nations’ … life in sort of a new or the original meaning of ‘think globally, act locally.’ (As one consequence, for example, Portland or any ‘urban’ density more than fifty thousand ‘locals,’ is too big to keep. Although that begs the question of where on Earth there could be cell phone manufacturing ….)
Beverly Hills cops? Surely you jest. This was in their pre-Eddie Murphy days, Hag my dear, and absolutely their onliest job then was keeping the riff-raff safely on the LA side of the border.
I was kidding, of course. I lived in LA briefly in the early 90′s, in Laurel Canyon, and I could never get over how scary the cops were, except perhaps in West Hollywood. I think Blackwater was modeled on the LAPD.
Ah, I see the problem — poor word choice on my part. Instead of checked on, I probably should have said interrogated. Actually, roust seemed to be what was on their mind, but I don’t think that they fancied following me twenty miles down Wilshire just to be sure I moved along.
As long as I was still where they expected me to be every time they came by, and was still suitably impressed by their awesome power, and didn’t fall alseep or otherwise become unsightly, they managed to be content.
(On an other note, sorry I got the indents screwed up; I just pressed the wrong reply to button, I guess.)
As long as it wasn’t an “enhanced” interrogation, LAPD-style, face down on the hood of the squad car. Don’t worry about indents; it’s my own blog and I can barely figure it out.
http://www.clevelandskyscrapers.com/cleveland/rockefeller.jpg
The Rockefeller Building in downtown Cleveland, built in 1905
The best (and scarce) good architecture was all 200 ft or so.
http://www.clevelandskyscrapers.com/cleveland/clesky200.html
Here, it was the massive flowering of cast-iron architecture in the late 1800′s, when we were still kicking Seattle’s sorry ass, then another boom from 1902 or so until the depression, spawned by the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905/06. Things went downhill after that, as I’m sure you can imagine. The 1895 city hall, wherein Mayor Sam makes out with 17 year olds, is the curving building in the foreground.
I like that building, it reminds me of some in San Francisco.
I do to. Screw those architectural snobs.
Hag,
When you talk about these big boxes that you do not like at all, I get to pondering. What about the inside? Are they as bad inside as outside?
Even beyond the above, can a skyscraper be “art” inside?
The lobby has been preserved in all its 70′s glory, with double height ceilings and minimal detailing other than rich rosewood veneered walls, which lend some warmth to the otherwise plain space.
At ‘Bellbottom’ put your chin against a marbled rib and look up. The swoop appears to extend out behind you, ‘blooming’ or something.
Some bank building (I forget the name) in Chicago is the same, and I once enticed a lovely to make an entire evening’s date of the chin-gawk — no frills, no expenses … if you don’t count the pharmaceut’s.
I once saw a ringer in Rochester, NY, although the marble joinery was so abysmal that it looked like the graph-paper version of our local “monument.” Still, it does make you feel small to stand at the bottom, as it was no doubt intended. wickedly ingenious of you…. Did you score that night?
y’know, there’s something about that ‘upper’ Midwest Catholicism credo, y’know, where everything is the opposite of the claims made for it. Jus’ saying, good girls don’t, and it wouldn’t be right for me to tell you, CH …
… uh, either one way or the other …
(P.S. so, on reflection, I’m thinking, like, LaVerne & Shirley. And speaking of which, that loosey Penny Marshall sure showed Hollywood how the couch is cast, eh? Only a little more seasoning and she might qualify for induction in the Honorary Hall of Hag — ya’ s’pose?)
She’d be very welcome, of course. She fits the bill perfectly. I bet she’d look great in a turban.